Walther Ritz au REHSEIS

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1...tzEinstein.pdf
"In sum, Einstein rejected the emission hypothesis prior to 1905 not
because of any direct empirical evidence against it, but because it
seemed to involve too many theoretical and mathematical complications.
By contrast, Ritz was impressed by the lack of empirical evidence
against the emission hypothesis, and he was not deterred by the
mathematical difficulties it involved. It seemed to Ritz far more
reasonable to assume, in the interest of the "economy" of scientific
concepts, that the speed of light depends on the speed of its source,
like any other projectile, rather than to assume or believe, with
Einstein, that its speed is independent of the motion of its source
even though it is not a wave in a medium; that nothing can go faster
than light; that the length and mass of any body varies with its
velocity; that there exist no rigid bodies; that duration and
simultaneity are relative concepts; that the basic parallelogram law
for the addition of velocities is not exactly valid; and so forth.
Ritz commented that "it is a curious thing, worthy of remark, that
only a few years ago one would have thought it sufficient to refute a
theory to show that it entails even one or another of these
consequences...." (...) Einstein's theory garnered prestigious
supporters such as Planck, Sommerfeld, and Wien, who endorsed and
protected it from the attacks of others, while Ritz's theory acquired
no supporters. Ehrenfest and Tolman called for unambiguous empirical
evidence to test Ritz's emission theory, but neither spent any effort
in extending it, and soon they both epoused Einstein's theory
unreservedly, especially following de Sitter's work. For a few years
immediately following its publication, Ritz's theory may have seemed
to be an odd and complicated curiosity, in comparison to the leading
approaches in electrodynamics. Ritz, the one man who had both the
skill and the motivation to advance it, had died. (...) I thank
OLIVIER DARRIGOL, Paul Forman, Michel Janssen, John Stachel, and Roger
H. Stuewer for their helpful comments and assistance."

http://www.waltherritz.ch/fichiers/fascicule_ritz.pdf
"Mais d'autres difficultés menaçaient dangereusement le monde de la
physique (optique, électrodynamique). Plusieurs physiciens de génie
étaient engagés dans cette lutte (Lorenz, Poincaré, Einstein) et
Walther Ritz fut de leur niveau, apportant des idées qui font de lui
un protagoniste majeur dans cette épopée. Malheureusement, ses travaux
en la matière remontent aux derniers mois de sa vie et il ne fut pas
en mesure d'éprouver et de développer les fruits de sa prodigieuse
imagination physique et mathématique. C'est ce destin douloureux d'un
physicien de génie, ce beau visage d'un savant de haut parage et
apprécié de ses contemporains, que nous entendons rappeler et
présenter à l'occasion des trois journées que nous lui consacrons avec
la Société valaisanne de physique."
Olivier Darrigol: "Ritz est l'auteur d'une tentative célèbre de
concilier l'électrodynamique et le principe de relativité dans une
théorie qui fait dépendre la vitesse de la lumière de celle de sa
source. Il fut aussi impliqué dans un débat avec Einstein sur la
signification des potentiels en électrodynamique."

Olivier Darrigol, Walther Ritz n'est jamais mentionné aux séminaires
du REHSEIS que vous organisez:

http://www.rehseis.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article570=fr
De l'usage de lhistoire dans les sciences physiques
Responsables : Nadine de Courtenay, Olivier Darrigol, Sara
Franceschelli, Jan Lacki
L'objectif de ce séminaire est d'examiner dans quelle mesure et de
quelles manières les physiciens font appel à lhistoire de leur
discipline.

http://www.rehseis.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article335=fr
"...les héritiers de James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann et Henri
Poincaré soulignent les vertus épistémiques dune diversité des
descriptions et considèrent que décrire est un acte dont la dynamique
transcende les objets originels de la description. Le projet « Modes,
niveaux et ordres de descriptions dans les sciences physiques »
s'inscrit dans la lignée de cette seconde attitude. Il se propose
d'explorer la manière dont les diverses sortes de descriptions
affectent notre capacité à résoudre des problèmes concrets, nous
poussent à étudier de nouvelles sortes de phénomènes et suggèrent de
nouveaux objets physiques. Comme les moyens de description d'un
physicien dépendent évidemment des cultures matérielle et
intellectuelle dans lesquelles il est immergé, cette approche devrait
faire ressortir les dimensions historiques de nos capacités
cognitives."

Êtes-vous un héritier de Walther Ritz, Olivier Darrigol? Est-ce qu'il
est un nonêtre en France?

http://wikilivres.info/wiki/1984/Pre...ie/Chapitre_IV
George Owell: "Withers, cependant, était déjà un nonêtre. Il
n'existait pas, il n'avait jamais existé."

Pentcho Valev

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1...tzEinstein.pdf
"In April, Henri Poincaré visited him to apologize personally in the
name of the Paris Academy of Sciences for not awarding him its Prix
Vaillant for a paper he had submitted for a mathematical competition,
promising that this injustice would be repaired. And just at this time
also, as noted above, Ritz had engaged Einstein in a discussion on the
blackbody radiation problem and the principles underlying the theory
of radiation. All of this while Ritz was desperately ill with
tuberculosis."

Olivier Darrigol, if you are a heir of both Ritz (secretly) and
Poincaré (openly), you should be able to imagine what would have
happened to Divine Albert (still "Albert the Plagiarist" in those
early times) if Ritz had not been "desperately ill with tuberculosis"
and Poincaré had not died soon afterwards.

Pentcho Valev

According to Walther Ritz, the speed of light does depend on the speed
of the light source, that is, Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light
postulate is false. Poincaré has no explicit reference to the
dependence/independence of the speed of light but:

http://www.brera.unimi.it/sisfa/atti/1998/giannetto.pdf
Henri Poincaré: "...les termes du second ordre auraient dû devenir
sensibles, et cependant le résultat [de l'expérience de Michelson-
Morley] a encore été négatif, la théorie de Lorentz laissant prévoir
un résultat positif. On a alors imaginé une hypothèse supplémentai
tous les corps subiraient un raccourcissement dans le sens du
mouvement de la Terre... cette étrange propriété semblerait un
véritable coup de pouce donné par la nature pour éviter que le
mouvement de la Terre puisse être révélé par des phénomènes optiques.
Ceci ne saurait me satisfaire et je crois devoir dire ici mon
sentiment: je considère comme très problables que les phénomènes
optiques ne dépendent que des mouvements relatifs des corpes matériels
en presence...et cela non pas aux quantités près de l'ordre du carré
ou du cube de l'aberration, mais rigouresement."

The above text amounts to advancing two premises:

Premise 1: There is no length contraction.

Premise 2: The principle of relativity is true.

Poincaré's two premises entail the following conclusion:

Conclusion: The speed of light does depend on the speed of the light
source, that is, Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is
false.

See also Banesh Hoffmann's confession:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
"Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested
in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second
principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do
far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the
particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it.
And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these
particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian
relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the
Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths,
local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein
resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of
particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and
introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less
obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1...tzEinstein.pdf
"In April, Henri Poincaré visited him to apologize personally in the
name of the Paris Academy of Sciences for not awarding him its Prix
Vaillant for a paper he had submitted for a mathematical competition,
promising that this injustice would be repaired. And just at this time
also, as noted above, Ritz had engaged Einstein in a discussion on the
blackbody radiation problem and the principles underlying the theory
of radiation. All of this while Ritz was desperately ill with
tuberculosis."

Olivier Darrigol, if you are a heir of both Ritz (secretly) and
Poincaré (openly), you should be able to imagine what would have
happened to Divine Albert (still "Albert the Plagiarist" in those
early times) if Ritz had not been "desperately ill with tuberculosis"
and Poincaré had not died soon afterwards.

Pentcho Valev

Henri Poincaré on his way towards Newton's emission theory of light
(only his early death prevented him from adopting Walther Ritz's
approach):

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.u...ode=404936&c=2
"The French polymath Henri Poincare, charged with producing a keynote
address on the state of physics and the problems the discipline faced,
warned of the need to root out dangerous hypotheses. In an extended
discussion of electrodynamics, and of Hendrik Lorentz's hypothesis of
length contraction by bodies in relative motion, Poincare raised the
prospect that the ether must be abandoned as an unsupported
hypothesis. He discussed the principle of relative motion in his 1900
papers, and named it the principle of relativity in 1904, according to
which no mechanical or electromagnetic experiment can discriminate
between a state of uniform motion and a state of rest. You'll not find
that information in many undergraduate textbooks. Einstein, then aged
just 21, was not in Paris (he was finishing his finals), but
Poincare's paper was published in the leading German physics journal."

Les élucubrations des Einsteiniens:

http://inac.cea.fr/Phocea/file.php?f...343/t343_1.pdf
Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji: "Chez Poincaré, la contraction des longueurs
et la dilatation des durées sont réelles.....Chez Einstein, la
contraction des longueurs et la dilatation des durées ne sont pas
réelles: elles sont le résultat d'un effet de perspective."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

According to Walther Ritz, the speed of light does depend on the speed
of the light source, that is, Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light
postulate is false. Poincaré has no explicit reference to the
dependence/independence of the speed of light but:

http://www.brera.unimi.it/sisfa/atti/1998/giannetto.pdf
Henri Poincaré: "...les termes du second ordre auraient dû devenir
sensibles, et cependant le résultat [de l'expérience de Michelson-
Morley] a encore été négatif, la théorie de Lorentz laissant prévoir
un résultat positif. On a alors imaginé une hypothèse supplémentai
tous les corps subiraient un raccourcissement dans le sens du
mouvement de la Terre... cette étrange propriété semblerait un
véritable coup de pouce donné par la nature pour éviter que le
mouvement de la Terre puisse être révélé par des phénomènes optiques.
Ceci ne saurait me satisfaire et je crois devoir dire ici mon
sentiment: je considère comme très problables que les phénomènes
optiques ne dépendent que des mouvements relatifs des corpes matériels
en presence...et cela non pas aux quantités près de l'ordre du carré
ou du cube de l'aberration, mais rigouresement."

The above text amounts to advancing two premises:

Premise 1: There is no length contraction.

Premise 2: The principle of relativity is true.

Poincaré's two premises entail the following conclusion:

Conclusion: The speed of light does depend on the speed of the light
source, that is, Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is
false.

See also Banesh Hoffmann's confession:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
"Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested
in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second
principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do
far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the
particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it.
And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these
particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian
relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the
Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths,
local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein
resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of
particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and
introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less
obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1...tzEinstein.pdf
"In April, Henri Poincaré visited him to apologize personally in the
name of the Paris Academy of Sciences for not awarding him its Prix
Vaillant for a paper he had submitted for a mathematical competition,
promising that this injustice would be repaired. And just at this time
also, as noted above, Ritz had engaged Einstein in a discussion on the
blackbody radiation problem and the principles underlying the theory
of radiation. All of this while Ritz was desperately ill with
tuberculosis."

Olivier Darrigol, if you are a heir of both Ritz (secretly) and
Poincaré (openly), you should be able to imagine what would have
happened to Divine Albert (still "Albert the Plagiarist" in those
early times) if Ritz had not been "desperately ill with tuberculosis"
and Poincaré had not died soon afterwards.

Pentcho Valev

http://www.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_215.pdf
Herbert Dingle: "The special relativity theory requires different
rates of ageing to result from motion which belongs no more to one
twin than to the other: that is impossible. It is impossible to
exaggerate the importance of this result, for this theory is, by
common consent, "taken for granted" in Max Born's words, in all modern
atomic research. and it determines the course of practically all
current developments in physical science, theoretical and
experimental, whether concerned with the laboratory or with the
universe. To continue to use the theory without discrimination,
therefore, is not only to follow a false trail in the investigation of
nature, but also to risk physical disaster on the unforeseeable
scale... (...) But it is now clear that the interpretation of those
[Lorentz] equations as constituting a basis for a new kinematics,
displacing that of Galileo and Newton, which is the essence of the
special relativity theory, leads inevitably to impossibilities and
therefore cannot be true. Either there is an absolute standard of rest
- call it the ether as with Maxwell. or the universe as with Mach, or
absolute space as with Newton, or what you will or else ALL MOTION,
INCLUDING THAT WITH THE SPEED OF LIGHT, IS RELATIVE, AS WITH RITZ."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
John Norton: "In Maxwell's theory, a light wave in a vacuum always
propagates at the same speed, c, with respect to the ether. So
measuring the speed of a light beam gives observers an easy way to
determine their motion in the ether. If they find the light to move at
c, the observers are at rest in the ether. If they find the light
frozen, they are moving at c in the ether. Since observers can
determine their absolute motion, the theory violates the principle of
relativity. The alternative theory that Einstein began to pursue was
an "emission theory." In such a theory, the speed of light in vacuo is
still c. But it is not c with respect to the ether; it is c with
respect to the source that emits the light. In such a theory,
observing the speed of a light beam tells observers nothing about
their absolute motion. It only reveals their motion with respect to
the source that emitted the light. If they find the beam to propagate
at c, the observers are at rest with respect to the emitter. If they
find the beam to be frozen, they are fleeing from the source at c. In
general, observers can only ascertain their relative velocity with
respect to the source. A distinctive property of this emission theory
is that there is no single velocity of light; the velocity will vary
according to the velocity of the emitter.
(...) That fact, presumably encouraged Einstein to persist in his
efforts to find a serviceable emission theory. Einstein persisted for
years, as he recalled in a 1920 recollection (Einstein, 1920):
Einstein: "The difficulty to be overcome lay in the constancy of the
velocity of light in a vacuum, which I first believed had to be given
up. Only after years of [jahrelang] groping did I notice that the
difficulty lay in the arbitrariness of basic kinematical concepts."
Eventually Einstein did give up on an emission theory. There is an
indication that the struggle with the emission theory was long and
arduous."

The struggle was "long and arduous" and continued up to 1915 because
the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light (which
is the true antithesis of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-
light postulate) was equivalent to the equation c'=c(1+phi/c^2)
showing how the speed of light varies with phi, the gravitational
potential. This latter equation was explicitly used by Einstein in the
period 1907-1915; in 1960 it was confirmed by the Pound-Rebka
experiment:

http://www.circlon-theory.com/HTML/poundRebka.html
"The Pound-Rebka Experiment is quite complex in its technical details
but in principle it is very simple. Photons of a precisely determined
wavelength were emitted at the top and bottom of the 22.5-meter-high
Jefferson Tower on the Harvard campus. When the photons from the top
of the tower were measured at the bottom, their wavelengths were
decreased (blue-shifted) by a small amount; and when photons from the
bottom were measured at the top, their wavelengths were increased (red-
shifted) by the same amount. Proponents of the theory of General
Relativity offer three different conflicting explanations of these
results that are said to be equivalent to each other and therefore all
equally correct.
(...) In the drawing of tower #1, the photons are emitted with a
wavelength of exactly one (=1). As they travel through the proposed
gravitational "field" at the constant velocity of C, they interact
with it so that the descending photons acquire mass, momentum and
energy from the field and the ascending photons transfer mass,
momentum and energy to the field. Thus the intrinsic wavelengths of
the photons gradually change as they move through the field. The main
problem with this explanation lies in the conceptualization of a
physical process by which mass, momentum and energy could be either
added to or subtracted from a photon without changing its velocity or
angular momentum.
(...) In the drawing of tower #2, the photons are emitted at a
wavelength of exactly one (=1) that remains constant as they move
through the gravitational "field." However, as they move thorough this
field, the photons "fall" toward the earth like any other material
body, so that the descending photons move at speeds increasingly
greater than C, and the ascending photons move at decreasing speeds of
less than C. During their time of travel (t=22.5/C=7.5052x10^(-8)s)
the ascending photons slow their velocity by (v=gt=.000000736m/s) and
the descending photons increase their velocity to C+.000000736m/s. The
red and blue shifts are Doppler shifts in which both source and
observer are in the same inertial reference frame and each photon is
in a different inertial reference frame. The shifts occur because the
ascending photons arrive at the observer at a relative velocity of
less than C and the descending photons arrive at a velocity greater
than C. This change in the photons' velocity will produce shifts in
their wavelengths of the measured value of 2.5x10^(-15).
(...) In the drawing of tower #3, it is proposed that gravity causes
clocks at the bottom of the tower to run slower than clocks at the
top. This causes the emitter to take more time to produce a photon and
thus increase its wavelength by 2.5 x 10^(-15). The faster clock at
the top of the tower makes the emitter produce its photons in shorter
time intervals and with shorter wavelengths. While all photons move at
exactly C in this example, the observer at the top of the tower would
measure their velocity to be less than C and the observer at the
bottom of the tower would measure their velocity to be greater than C.
This is due to their clocks running at different rates."

Einsteiniana's three-equivalent-and-equally-correct-explanations
camouflage has an Achilles heel: The second explanation ("the photons
"fall" toward the earth like any other material body") is given by
Newton's emission theory and contradicts Einstein's theory. Einstein's
general relativity predicts that, as photons "fall" toward the earth,
their acceleration is two times greater than the acceleration of other
material bodies:

http://www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German. It predated the full
formal development of general relativity by about four years. You can
find an English translation of this paper in the Dover book 'The
Principle of Relativity' beginning on page 99; you will find in
section 3 of that paper Einstein's derivation of the variable speed of
light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is:
c'=c0(1+phi/c^2) where phi is the gravitational potential relative to
the point where the speed of light co is measured......You can find a
more sophisticated derivation later by Einstein (1955) from the full
theory of general relativity in the weak field approximation....For
the 1955 results but not in coordinates see page 93, eqn (6.28):
c(r)=[1+2phi(r)/c^2]c. Namely the 1955 approximation shows a variation
in km/sec twice as much as first predicted in 1911."

http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-01/6-01.htm
"In geometrical units we define c_0 = 1, so Einstein's 1911 formula
can be written simply as c=1+phi. However, this formula for the speed
of light (not to mention this whole approach to gravity) turned out to
be incorrect, as Einstein realized during the years leading up to 1915
and the completion of the general theory. In fact, the general theory
of relativity doesn't give any equation for the speed of light at a
particular location, because the effect of gravity cannot be
represented by a simple scalar field of c values. Instead, the "speed
of light" at a each point depends on the direction of the light ray
through that point, as well as on the choice of coordinate systems, so
we can't generally talk about the value of c at a given point in a non-
vanishing gravitational field. However, if we consider just radial
light rays near a spherically symmetrical (and non- rotating) mass,
and if we agree to use a specific set of coordinates, namely those in
which the metric coefficients are independent of t, then we can read a
formula analogous to Einstein's 1911 formula directly from the
Schwarzschild metric. (...) In the Newtonian limit the classical
gravitational potential at a distance r from mass m is phi=-m/r, so if
we let c_r = dr/dt denote the radial speed of light in Schwarzschild
coordinates, we have c_r =1+2phi, which corresponds to Einstein's 1911
equation, except that we have a factor of 2 instead of 1 on the
potential term."

Therefore, the Pound-Rebka experiment confirmed Newton's emission
theory of light and refuted Einstein's general relativity.

Pentcho Valev